You cannot play football to lose. Don’t even try.
There’s a medical cart bearing the name of anyone who thinks that way on the sidelines, all set to transport them to a waiting ambulance.
But if you’re the Edmonton Eskimos or Saskatchewan Roughriders, how do you not take at look at the Canadian Football League (CFL) standings and games remaining in the 2017 season and at least try to carve out a scenario that allows you to be the team crossing over to the East Division playoffs?
This year, the CFL’s East Division has looked a whole lot like a scene from The Three Little Pigs. It didn’t take long to realize that the Montreal Alouettes and the Hamilton Tigers Cats were made of straw. The big bad wolf came and blew them down early without much of a huff or a puff.
Hamilton has started to rebuild a little, propping up a few pieces of that straw into a bit of a lean-to in order to go 5-2 since the arrival of June Jones, but they will finish their final two games this season and go looking for some bricks. The Alouettes look like they are trying to rebuild their house with spider webs and yarn. They have lost nine games in a row and might not be finished losing yet.
A little further up East Division street, you find the homes of the Toronto Argonauts and the Ottawa Redblacks. It’s easy to call them sturdier than the ones belonging to their siblings, but at best, their homes are constructed with sticks. With one game remaining for the Argos and two left for Ottawa, neither one is even sitting at .500. You could huff and puff enough to take them down and still have enough air left to blow up some balloons for the after-party.
That’s what is making the crossover spot as tantalizing as some of the snacks at that after-party.
The crossover rule in the CFL is actually great.
In the shakedown that is the 18-game schedule, sometimes teams in one division are going to be stronger than teams in another division. Why would any league want to reward inferiority?
It is why the National Hockey League (NHL) now has wild cards.
A team with a better record from one division should be able to replace a team with a poorer record from the other division when a playoff spot is on the line.
It does make sense.
But disappointment in the East, and that crossover, have created a bit of a moral issue for the Edmonton Eskimos and the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
Take a look into the crystal ball that is the final two weeks of the CFL’s regular season. The Eskimos and the ‘Riders play each other in Week 20 to close out the year and you can carve out a pretty easy scenario in which that game will decide which of them finishes third in the West Division, and what team finishes fourth.
Here’s the skinny on the standings:
Right now, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers have a fairly solid hold on second place in the West. Based on the fact that the Bombers went 2-0 against both Edmonton and Saskatchewan this year and own the tiebreaker against both, Saskatchewan can’t catch them and Edmonton needs to beat Calgary and the Roughriders and have Winnipeg lose their final two games in order to make it happen on their end.
Edmonton leads the Riders by two points in the West and the teams have played just one game against each other. Saskatchewan won it by 23 points. If the Eskimos beat the Roughriders on November 4, breaking any tie between them comes down to point differential in games played against each other.
The question of what is best for your team and how to make it happen comes into play.
Let’s say you are the team that finishes in third place. You get to feel like you are better than the fourth place team, but what will be your reward? You have to go to Winnipeg in November for what is probably a pretty chilly road game in front of a hostile crowd against a team you haven’t beaten this year.
Or you could … “Head east, young men.”
You could take on a club that is just trying to finish the year with a winning record.
If you have to play in the West, and you happen to win that road game in the ‘Peg, then the Western final happens in Calgary against a Stampeder team that isn’t just the Three Little Pigs’ equivalent of a brick house. Calgary’s house is inside a gated community. With a really big gate.
Meanwhile, the team in the Eastern picture could conceivably win a semi-final and be one more win from a Grey Cup berth and everyone knows that anything can happen once you get to that game.
Just ask last year’s Stampeders’ team.
That Edmonton/Saskatchewan match-up in Week 20 could give the loser the more attractive future.
You’ll hear everyone involved downplay it. They’ll say things like, “To win it all, you have to beat everybody.”
And they will be absolutely right. And they will be saying the right things.
But whichever team finishes lowest in the West Division standings and still makes the playoffs stands to be a whole lot happier than the team finishing one spot ahead of them in those very same standings.
They also stand to be around a whole lot longer. Maybe all the way to the Grey Cup.